Moving J2EE applications from one environment to another by Administrators is currently nontrivial. In addition to the difficulty in determining the external resource requirements of an application, it is also difficult to provide appropriate resolutions for these resources in a convenient manner. These resolutions need to be added to the descriptors of the application. At this point, the Administrator is in Developer territory and is faced with a daunting task of having to unpack the application (something that the administrator would rather not do), determine the appropriate descriptor and the appropriate attribute within the descriptor to modify, and ensure that this is done without any mistakes. The main reason for this difficulty is that application composition related information and application configuration information are all present in the descriptors with separate distinctions being made.
A similar portability problem exists in moving an application from one J2EE application server environment to another. What is needed is a deployment plan that addresses the problems and shortcomings of the prior art.